“Vows, commitments, promises, alliances, dances, parties. How we do these things exceeds, as it always has, the commonly understood manifestation of marriage, family, community and public. Formal justice lies far, far behind and at the same time evinces the conditions of its possibility in these moments.”

“You don’t need the feminist label or a college degree to strive for women’s independence and feminist ideals. All my mother needed was three daughters to fight for, including one slightly obnoxious daughter who doesn’t let anything go.”

“I worry for my daughters. I suppose that’s odd, as I don’t have children, but I worry nonetheless. I worry for those little brown girls in my future and I wish, how I wish, that I could change everything now.”

“In the United States, color is a strange marker, particular because it rarely has as much to do with phenotype as it does one’s past. Of course facial features, skin color, and even speech patterns may be indications of racial and/or ethnic background, but it goes far beyond what is in the eye of the beholder. Beyond the factor of family trees, parentage being one of the biggest indicators of race (i.e. one may appear phenotypically white, but with one non-white parent, the possibility of whiteness dissolves), region, nationality, and language play huge roles as determining factors in the race game. In fact, despite markers of everything BUT non-white heritage in all other facets, including one’s appearance, like in the case of Nina Garcia, a last name of non-English origin can mean more than what literally meets the eye.”

“For my whole life, I’ve been told not to be too ambitious. Not to get my hopes up too high. Not to have unrealistic expectations. Nobody important will ever listen to you. You can’t change things, you may as well just work out the best way to live with it. You’ll only regret it when it doesn’t go the way you want it to.”

“This vetting process is, of course, just another facet of cis people deciding whether or not you’re allowed to be a woman. If your vagina doesn’t match up to their (biased) expectations, then you’re relegated back to the “almost woman” category and looked upon as a kind of second class woman who can never match up the vaunted first class or ‘real’ women. You can guarantee that they will find flaws in your vaginal construction that invalidate your femininity, even though their OWN vagina would not stand up to such intense scrutiny.”

“Thus, did my life take me in a direction I never saw it going, because I had just begun to grasp onto this part of me that was OK with identifying as someone who is disabled. Not only that, I had not really learned how to interact with other people who identified that way. I was shy about venturing out as any kind of public face, let alone as any kind of self-spoken authority. Who was I, I wondered, to pretend that what I had to say mattered?”

We’ve been pwned at the news with nipples is just scary, and something a fair portion of Australia could do with reading:

“We – the public and the media – have been pwned by the Howard, Rudd and Gillard Governments. They wanted us to hate asylum seekers, and now we hate asylum seekers. They wanted us to think that 692 people a year is a massive problem, and now we think that 692 people a year is a MASSIVE PROBLEM.”